Fresh off his court appearance in Denver on Tuesday, Schnare, explained that Colorado’s renewable energy mandate violates the commerce clause in two ways.

The first is what Schnare calls a “facial” violation. Colorado’s mandate provides preferences for electricity from renewable sources that originate in Colorado. It’s commonly called the multiplier. Every megawatt of electricity from a renewable source inside Colorado is counted as 1.25 megawatts. The same electricity from producers in other states enjoys no such preference. Since Colorado is part of multi-state grid, the multiplier is a significant and unfair advantage in favor of Colorado-produced electricity.

Schnare explained with this analogy, “7.5 apples in Colorado are not equal to 10 apples in another state.”

Apparently Attorney General John Suthers, whose office is charged with defending the mandate, knows that as well. Schnare said it was the AG’s office that tried to get legislation to repeal the multiplier passed at the end of the 2012 session because if the state loses then it has to pay all the attorneys’ fees and costs associated with the lawsuit.

While the bill SB12-178 died last year, Schnare believes a similar bill will pass this year, which brings us to the second violation that Schnare calls a “balancing test” question. Is the harm to interstate commerce greater than the local benefit? Schnare argues that the mandate does not provide any benefit. In fact just the opposite is true.

Much of the renewable energy advocates’ argument in favor of the mandate is the necessity to minimize the negative impacts of man-made global warming. But Schnare suggests, that if global warming is real, then Colorado stands to benefit because it will get more rainfall. So attempts to mitigate global warming will actually cause more harm than good.

Schnare will be back in district court in Denver on May 1, 2013, at which time he expects a timeline for discovery and a trial date, which is good news since this lawsuit was filed originally in April 2011.

Many people will uncritically blame fossil fuel use for recent warm weather. But they are blind to how fossil fuels have reduced climate-related deaths since the 1920s. Since then, climate-related death rates have decreased by 98 percent, explains a Reason Foundation study by Indur Goklany. During this time, carbon dioxide emissions increased significantly.

Thanks to the fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and farm machinery enabled by fossil fuels, increased global food production has made droughts less deadly. Where extreme weather leaves people hungry and injured, fossil-fuel based transportation enables fast delivery of food, medical supplies, and disaster response units.

Wealth is a population’s best protection from climate risks, and wealth creation requires affordable, reliable energy. But billions of people in poor under-developed countries are still very vulnerable to climate risks. They need affordable and reliable energy — now. Obstructing their use of fossil fuels endangers their lives.

And droughts? Two recent studies published this year challenge the notion that global warming contributes to them. In the Journal of Climate, CU-Boulder and NOAA researchers “conclude that projections of acute and chronic [increases in severe droughts] … are likely an exaggerated indicator for future Great Plains drought severity.” In the journal Nature, Princeton University researchers find that “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.” In the same issue of Nature, a lead IPCC author wrote that “the findings imply that there is no necessary correlation between temperature changes and long-term drought variations.”

Just days ago during the World Renewable Energy Forum, Arvizu stated, “’fossil fuels should be phased out by 2040 to blunt man-made climate change,’”… and that natural gas is little more than “’a nice bridge technology, but not the answer we are looking for in terms of a transition and transformation,’” away from fossil fuels and toward alternatives such as wind, solar, and biofuels, of which NREL is a champion.

The National Science Board has two important roles. First, it establishes the policies of NSF [National Science Foundation] within the framework of applicable national policies set forth by the President and the Congress. In this capacity, the Board identifies issues that are critical to NSF’s future, approves NSF’s strategic budget directions and the annual budget submission to the Office of Management and Budget, and approves new major programs and awards. The second role of the Board is to serve as an independent body of advisors to both the President and the Congress on policy matters related to science and engineering and education in science and engineering. In addition to major reports, the NSB also publishes occasional policy papers or statements on issues of importance to U.S. science and engineering.

The NREL press release describes the NSB:

The 25-member body advises the president and Congress on science and engineering issues, and is the policy-setting and budget-approving body for the National Science Foundation. With an annual budget of $6.9 billion, the foundation funds about 20 percent of all federally supported basic scientific research at U.S. colleges and universities. Arvizu will serve a two-year term as chairman.

With an anti-fossil fuel, global warming alarmist like Arvizu at the helm of the NSB, the politicalization of science will continue when it comes to energy policy.

Perhaps the number one reason for pushing so-called clean, green renewable energy projects is to reduce warming that, according to climate change proponents, increases climate volatility–(formerly known as global warming and now increasingly identified as the wild but undefined “change” that so worries them)–creating the need to build ever more renewable projects.

Using sensors aboard a NASA satellite, researchers at the University at Albany-State University of New York, and the University of Illinois systematically tracked a cluster of wind farms in central Texas as the installations grew from a few dozen turbines in 2003 to more than 2,350 by 2011.

On average, the nighttime air around the wind farms became about 0.72 degree Celsius warmer over that time, compared with the surrounding area, the scientists reported Sunday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change.

“The warming trend corresponds very well with the growth of the wind turbines,” said wind-energy expert Somnath Baidya Roy at the University of Illinois, who was part of the research group. “The warming is going to level off when you stop adding more turbines.”

While converting the kinetic energy of wind into electricity, wind turbines modify exchanges between the ground and atmosphere, and affect the transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the air, the authors of the study said.
…
“Our results show a significant warming trend of up to 0.72 degree per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to nearby non-wind-farm regions,” wrote lead author Liming Zhou, a Research Associate Professor from the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at University at Albany. “We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms as its spatial pattern and magnitude couples very well with the geographic distribution of wind turbines.”

With calls for increasing wind farm generation through renewable energy mandates or increasing government subsidies over the next two decades, this warming effect could pose significant local problems if the amount of increase–0.72 degrees Celsius–holds.

Scientists say the world’s average temperature has warmed by about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1900, and nearly 0.2 degrees per decade since 1979. Efforts to cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions are not seen as sufficient to stop the planet heating up beyond 2 degrees C this century, a threshold scientists say risks an unstable climate in which weather extremes are common.

As of this post [10:08 AM], the PUC has yet to post a written copy of the Department of Public Health and Environment’s determination whether Xcel’s two new fuel switching plans meet “reasonably foreseeable” federal and state air regulations. Yesterday, Chairman Ron Binz said that the CDPHE’s filing was due last evening at 5 PM. If the CDPHE finds that the two fuel switching plans do not meet “readily foreseeable” air quality regulations, then they must be discarded. The CDPHE ruling will likely be the first topic of discussion at the hearing this morning.